On the afternoon of November 15, 1994, Adrian Doorbal, a weightlifter with a penchant for extreme violence and a serious steroid addiction, sat in the front seat of a rented van, waiting to abduct the millionaire owner of a Miami deli.

On paper it wasn't a difficult job. Not only did Doorbal and his two accomplices outnumber their target - Marc Schiller - three-to-one, they were also armed with a gun and a shock-inducing Taser, which was capable of paralysing a person from a distance of six metres.

There were literally times during the case when the lawyers would [approach the bench] to talk about an issue and we would just shake our heads and laugh because of the stupidity

Despite these advantages, Doorbal was worried. This was, after all, the gang's eighth attempt, the seventh having taken place just the day before, and one could be forgiven for wondering whether something was going seriously wrong in the planning stages of the operation. Two weeks previously, for example, their plan had been to dress up as ninjas on Halloween and grab Schiller when he opened his door to what appeared to be a group of trick-or-treaters. Somehow this idea fell by the wayside and they ended up going to a strip club instead.

Then, a few days later, before dawn, they had donned camouflage paint and hidden in Schiller's yard under some tarpaulin, ready to pounce when he came out to get his newspaper. But, again, the mission had to be cancelled when it suddenly dawned on them they would be exposed by the headlights of oncoming cars. So, today there could be no mistakes.

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At first, everything seemed to go well. Just after 4pm, Schiller emerged from his deli and started walking towards his car. As he inserted his key in the lock, the gang grabbed him from behind and dragged him into the van, employing the Taser with gusto. But if they thought this breakthrough proved they had suddenly become criminal masterminds, they were very much mistaken.

Today, Marc Schiller lives in a small one-bedroom apartment in Boca Raton, Florida. In contrast to 1994, when he had a house with a pool, his own accountancy firm, a deli and $US1.26 million ($1.4 million) in the bank, he is now an employee of a modest-sized company which pays him $us20 an hour. He rarely socialises outside of work, is divorced from his wife, sees his children only occasionally and has, by his own admission, "zero" interest in making friends.

'When I saw it I thought, who is this person?': Marc Schiller's shocking kidnapping experience has been recounted in Pain & Gain, although he was not consulted and his name has been changed. Photo: AP

He's not a man given to self-pity, but anyone who hears what happened to him after he was kidnapped by Doorbal and his accomplices can't fail to feel sorry for him. And now, to compound his problems, a film has been made that depicts him in a far from favourable light.

Pain & Gain, which stars Mark Wahlberg, is a high-tempo black comedy that pokes fun at the bodybuilder gang, but goes out of its way to stigmatise Schiller as well in order, one assumes, to generate some sympathy for its leading man. Schiller's name has been changed, but it would take about two minutes on Google to identify him, since the case was well covered by Miami newspapers at the time and in a three-part serial by the journalist Pete Collins in 1999.

"No one [involved with the film] ever talked to me," he says now. "It wasn't me they put in the movie. When I saw it I thought, 'who is this person?"' On screen, Victor Kershaw (aka Schiller) brags about his money, treats his employees with contempt and drives around with the words "Miami B----" emblazoned on his number plate. In reality, says Alex Ferrer, the judge who presided over the case, Schiller wasn't like that at all.

"In the movie they made him out to look slimier than he was," says Ferrer. "He really wasn't a slimy guy." And besides, he adds, "nobody deserves what he got. Nobody". The man ultimately responsible for what happened to Schiller was a former car salesman called Jorge Delgado. In 1991 he had come to work for Schiller as a sales representative at his accountancy firm, and, over the next 18 months, the quietly spoken Cuban had become a trusted friend, looking after Schiller's house when he and his family went on holiday and working with him on other ventures.

But things started to sour in late 1992 when Delgado joined a bodybuilders' hang-out called Sun Gym. There he met Daniel Lugo (played by Wahlberg in the film), a 6ft 2in muscle-bound personal trainer, the gym's manager and a convicted fraudster. When Lugo heard about Delgado's work with Schiller, he initially wanted to go into business with them both, but Schiller was not interested.

"The first time I met him, I could tell there was something," says Schiller. "He was unsavoury. He couldn't look you in the eye. You could tell he was hiding something." In October 1994, Lugo arranged a meeting with Doorbal, his workout partner, Stevenson Pierre, Sun Gym's back-office manager, and a friend of Pierre's called Carl Weekes.

"Are you," he asked Pierre and Weekes, "interested in making $us100,000 for two days' work?" He'd recently discovered that "a scumbag" named Marc Schiller had stolen money from a gym member called Jorge Delgado. He wanted to kidnap Schiller, force him to return the money and, while they were at it, take his house, his cars, his savings and anything else they could get their hands on.

One month later they were in the back of a Ford Astrovan racing towards a warehouse in North Miami with a bruised and bewildered Schiller at their feet. Once there, a blindfolded Schiller was punched, pistol whipped and Tasered again. The gang played Russian roulette against his temple. One of them, Schiller believes it was Doorbal, took a lighter to his arm and burnt his flesh until it sizzled.

After that he was forced to phone his wife and tell her he had gone on a last-minute business trip. She should fly to Colombia with their children for a family event and he would follow in a couple of days. To Schiller's relief, she agreed - at least his family was now out of harm's way - but it now meant his captors had access to his empty house. They started quizzing him about his assets.

"OK," said one of them. "You have a house that's paid for, your wife's family money that you invest, your wife's jewellery, an apartment in Miami Beach, jet skis..." It was obvious immediately that his former friend Delgado was behind the operation; nobody else knew all these details. Schiller also clocked who he was talking to. "This is the Daniel Lugo Show," he thought.

Over the next few days Schiller - still blindfolded - took a series of calls patched through to the warehouse from his home phone. Each time, a gun was placed against his head and he pretended nothing was amiss. He was also called upon to sign dozens of documents. He couldn't see them, but it was obvious what was happening: the gang were transferring everything he had into their name. After a month in captivity - which Schiller spent chained up and blindfolded without a change of clothes and only intermittent food - the gang were satisfied that they'd got as much as they could and revealed the end game. First, Schiller had to phone his lawyer with an outlandish story: he'd been having an affair with a Cuban beauty, his wife had found out and now he was depressed and suicidal.

Then he was told to get drunk. At gunpoint, he downed vodka, tequila and chocolate liqueur, some of it mixed with sleeping pills. At 2.30am on December 15, they put him in his car and drove him to an industrial park. Lugo placed a comatose Schiller in the driver's seat, stepped on the accelerator and steered the vehicle towards a concrete pole. Just before the crash, Lugo jumped out, but when the men ran up to inspect the wreckage, they found to their chagrin Schiller was still alive.

So they moved on to Plan B: Lugo sprayed the car with petrol and set it alight. Unfortunately for the gang, Lugo had forgotten to strap Schiller in. As they pulled away in their car, they saw their man - revived by the heat - stumble out and weave his way towards the road. Weekes, behind the wheel, hit him and then, for good measure, turned the car around and ran him over. Schiller remembers none of this. The next thing he knew he was in hospital, the searing pain in his body proving he was still alive. In a book he has written about his ordeal, he lists his injuries: a twisted spine, a shattered pelvis, a ruptured bladder and a damaged spleen. But Schiller's first concern was for his immediate survival: he organised for an air ambulance to take him to a hospital in Staten Island. And it was lucky he did, because that very morning the Sun Gym gang, dressed in hospital uniforms, were on their way to kill him.

Over the next four months, Schiller recuperated and tried to put his finances back in order. His house now belonged to a corporation in the Bahamas, his deli franchise had been dissolved, his offshore accounts were empty and $us160,000 had been spent on his credit cards to buy, among other things, thousands of condoms and adult films. He learnt later that Lugo had been living in his house, calling himself "Tom" and telling neighbours he was a member of the US security forces and the house had been confiscated by the government. The neighbours liked him. He changed light bulbs for them and helped with odd jobs.

Why didn't Schiller go to the police all this time? He maintains he thought they wouldn't believe him and he wanted to gather his own evidence. He also decided it would be best to try to negotiate the return of his money instead of going to court when he had no money for lawyers.

He hired a private investigator named Ed Du Bois, who went to meet Lugo and came across all the evidence he needed. "They put me and Ed Seibert [a former homicide detective] in a small office," remembers Du Bois, now 70. "And after a while we noticed the trash can underneath the desk was overflowing with paper. We started looking through it and almost everything pertained to Schiller's kidnapping."

The gang had obviously been cleaning up their files, but instead of shredding their papers, had put them in the bin. "There were copies of cheques written to all the bad guys for their part in the crime," says Du Bois. "So we had more than Lugo and Delgado - we had the whole gang." With this haul and Lugo showing no signs of handing back any money, Schiller and Du Bois finally went to the police in April 1995. Unsurprisingly, they wondered why Schiller had waited so long to contact them. And while they stalled, the gang moved on to their next victims - a millionaire called Frank Griga and his girlfriend, Krisztina Furton.

This would-be kidnapping was a far more brutal and brief affair, although no less farcical. Instead of tying Griga up and forcing him to sign over his assets, Doorbal got into a fight with the Hungarian and ended up killing him. When Furton started screaming, she was sedated with Rompun - a horse tranquilliser - but the dose was far too high and she died as well. The hapless weightlifters then cut up the bodies with a chainsaw. As soon as the couple were reported missing, Lugo and his accomplices fell under suspicion and, when one of the detectives who had worked on the Schiller case heard a gang of weightlifters were in the frame, he immediately phoned Du Bois. Within a matter of hours, all but Lugo had been arrested. The ringleader, who had fled to the Bahamas, was picked up five days later.

Today, Lugo and Doorbal are both on death row. Delgado served seven years. And Schiller is working 11 hours a day for less money than he earned in his first job out of college and doing what he can to forget his ordeal. When the case came to trial, in 1998, the prosecution was able to present the jury with 10,000 pieces of evidence concerning both the murders and Schiller's kidnapping, and testimony from more than 100 witnesses, including one statement that revealed Lugo went back to the DIY store, Home Depot, to return the chainsaw he had bought to dismember Griga and Furton because it was suffering from a burnt-out engine.

"There were literally times during the case when the lawyers would [approach the bench] to talk about an issue and we would just shake our heads and laugh because of the stupidity," says Ferrer, the judge. "The case was incredibly tragic, but it had a lot of dark humour in it."